Somewhere in the great murk of the 1990s, the British songwriter Joe Jackson (check out his catalog – it includes lots more than just “Is She Really Going Out With Him” and “Stepping Out”) wrote a song called “It’s All Too Much” which is about being overwhelmed with choices. One of the verses is:

I hate this supermarket, But I have to say it makes me think
A hundred mineral waters, Fun to guess which ones are safe to drink
Two hundred brands of cookies, 87 kinds of chocolate chip
They say that choice is freedom, I’m so free it drives me to the brink?

Yeah, Joe, that’s about what it is like in the business world, too. The choices of products available is overwhelming. There are categories, subcategories, and subsets of categories. Think you’ll get killed in the marketplace? Invent a new category. Everyone is doing it. So how do you decide what products should work in your marketing tech stack? I’ve been there, and it can be an all-consuming experience.

One reason is the sheer volume of stuff out there. According to Chiefmartec.com’s latest Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic published in May, the marketing technology landscape exploded in 2024, with a 27.8% increase in tools from last year (now featuring more than 14,106 products)! Let that sink in for a moment. More than 14,000 products to choose from, and nearly a third of the products out there didn’t exist a year ago.

Wow! Here are a few highlights:
– Content Marketing: 1,404 products on the market
– Sales Automation & Intelligence: 1,037 products, and you probably haven’t heard of most of them
– Social Media Marketing & Monitoring: 468 products

I experienced this abundance of choices firsthand. When my previous employer had been divested and sold to a private equity firm, I had the opportunity to build the marketing tech stack from the ground up. Choosing the CRM, marketing automation platform, and intent data tools were easy decisions. But something was lacking. That something was a repository of all documents related to the sales process. My vision was a searchable, browser-based repository that would house the usual brochures, case studies, and sales decks; I went expansive and added published articles, videos of speaking engagements, analyst reports, and more. Going the extra mile, I wanted a calendar of events and campaigns. In one quick glance, people would know when and where the tradeshows were, along with what I was doing to support them.

This repository-with-calendar straddled a bunch of categories, so finding vendors was a challenge. More than 100 companies did repositories and a third of those also did calendars. I wound up sitting through product demos from about 30 different companies. Some were repository rockstars while others did a good job on the calendar. Finding the right one took several weeks. My eyeballs glazed and even my cat could recite the spiel I presented to the vendors.

Overwhelmed by choices? You’re probably just getting started. A recent survey by the software products review site G2 stated that 78% of buyers focus on products they’ve heard of before starting their research. Even after diving into the search, people have already made up their minds. And it’s all too much.